


The Hellbeast Honky-Tonk

by shellfishDimes



Category: John Dies at the End - David Wong
Genre: Body Horror, Gen, Gore, Monsters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-16
Updated: 2012-12-16
Packaged: 2017-11-21 06:55:44
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,396
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/594759
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shellfishDimes/pseuds/shellfishDimes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dave wants to start the sentence with <i>this might sound insane</i>, but it would be insulting John's intelligence to assume that he wouldn't believe him straight away. They've seen a lot of weird shit since they first took the soy sauce and started dabbling in monster hunts. So instead of trying to suspend John's disbelief, he cuts right to the chase. "Do you still have that three-barrelled shotgun?"</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Hellbeast Honky-Tonk

**Author's Note:**

> This is set after the end of _John Dies At The End_ and before the beginning of _This Book is Full of Spiders_. There's also [a fanmix](http://8tracks.com/shellfishdimes/the-hellbeast-honky-tonk/). If you're David Wong and you're reading this, I'm not even sorry. Not one bit. Not at all.

Dave is brushing his teeth in the halogen, sickly light of his bathroom at three in the morning when his jaw clicks. A dull pain throbs at the side of his face. He spits the excess toothpaste into the sink and rubs his jaw, his fingers scratching over rough stubble. He meets the eyes of his reflection. He tries and fails to remember when he last had a shave or a full night's sleep. However, he has no problem with seeing the other side of five a.m., as long as it means that the fucked up dreams of scuttling wig monsters and people's eyeballs exploding out of their faces will stay away from him. 

He decides that he's done with dental hygiene for the night. Turning on the tap, he bends over to rinse his mouth out. His jaw clicks again when he opens his mouth to catch the water. Although the pain is on both sides of his face this time, Dave only acknowledges it after he's straightened up and wiped his mouth with the hem of his old Black Flag shirt. A much-worn shirt when he was a teenager, in theory it is now supposed to serve as pyjamas, but it has recently taken on the role of Dave's permanent slob/insomniac superhero costume. He only takes it off when he starts seriously considering burning it as chemical waste rather than putting it through a very aggressive wash cycle.

Hands on both sides of the sink, Dave leans closer to the mirror. Very slowly, he starts opening his mouth, trying to ignore the pinpricks of pain that travel down his jaw. 

He opens his mouth wider, and wider still.

There's a crack as his jaw separates from the rest of his face. 

Dave watches with horror as the Dave in the mirror leans his head back. He feels something warm and sticky travel up his throat. His knees buckle, and he sags forward, holding onto the sink for dear life. He retches, but he can't move. He can't do anything because there's _something_ travelling up his throat.

It is most definitely not vomit, because vomit doesn't writhe. 

He tries to swallow it back, but his mouth is still widening – if he wasn't trying to grip the sink so tightly, he could probably push both his arms down his own throat, up to his elbows. 

His heart is hammering in his chest like it's going to jump out, and when he looks down he can see his lower jaw, complete with lips, teeth and tongue, hanging in front of him, drool and blood and toothpaste sticking the Black Flag logo to his chest. 

Stupidly, Dave thinks, _Shit, I'm definitely going to have to throw this away now._

Dave looks at himself in the mirror as a sucking noise fills his ears, like trying to catch the last dregs of a Wendy's chocolate Frosty. He can see the thing at the back of his throat now: it's hairy and matted with Dave's blood and other bodily fluids he doesn't want to think about, and it's trying to push its way out of what remains of his mouth. His stomach spasms and he can see his own tongue, now lying on his chest with the rest of his lower jaw, wiggle around as it tries to form words without a palate and lips. 

And then, two hands, knotted and black and shiny with blood, claw up his throat and out of his mouth. Dave watches with horror and revulsion as they press against his upper jaw and push. The heels of the thing's hands dig into his incisors, its fingertips on Dave's cheeks and its claws a hair's breadth away from his eyes. Dave is oddly thankful that his tongue is all the way down there so that he can't taste the thing, because it smells worse than a rotting corpse, and he has smelled plenty of those. 

Realisation dawns on David Wong. It's that time of the month. He's shedding his skin. Monster Dave has finally come knocking. 

He wrenches his arms away from the sink, trying to grab at the monster's hands, to stop it from coming out, to push it back in, _anything,_ but he can barely lift his arms to his shoulders, let alone muster the strength to subdue one of Korrok's slaves. 

Dave thinks of his crossbow, a present from John, lying all the way under his sofa. He can barely stand up, let alone run to the living room, go under the sofa to get it and try to shoot himself in the throat. 

The monster gives a powerful shove, and Dave feels the back of his head hit between his shoulder blades. The thing that was in him slithers out, shedding him to the floor. 

The smell is horrifying, like shit and rotten eggs. Dave sees the monster jump on his sink, all black carapace and fangs. There's something pink dangling from the tip of its tail. Dave thinks it's a venom sac at first, like with a scorpion, but then he realises that it's a part of his small intestine.

Dave's eyes roll into the back of his head and finally, darkness reigns.

  


* * *

  


Dave jolts awake on his ratty sofa, the sudden movement making his laptop slide to the floor. His headphones unplug from the jack in the process, and the sound of Kurt Cobain screaming and slurring through _Territorial Pissings_ fills Dave's living room. 

He grabs his face with both hands, feeling his jaw. He sticks his tongue out, finding it still attached to the rest of him along with his jaw. Dave is so incredibly relieved that he immediately leans over and vomits on the floor, having the forethought to shove his laptop out of the way beforehand. 

When he's done he sits up, shuddering, and peels his shirt off. He wipes his mouth with it, rubbing the cotton down his tongue to get some of the taste out. He then uses it to soak up the vomit on the carpet, thankful that he didn't have a big dinner last night. Dave bunches the shirt into a sticky, smelly ball, and walks to his kitchen on shaky legs to dump it in the trash can under the sink.

He twists the cold water tap as far as it will go and pushes his entire head under the spray. For once, his sink is empty of mouldy plates and coffee-stained mugs, an unexpected silver lining. He drinks until he can't taste the bile on his tongue anymore, and until he can feel every swallow of the cold water in his mouth, sliding down his throat and into his stomach. 

Dave sinks down on the crumb-filled kitchen floor and fishes his phone out of his pocket. The display says 04:35 a.m. The thing with the monster could have been a dream. It could have also been a vision of the future. It could happen the next night, or in an hour. Dave doesn't want to stick around to find out. He unlocks the keyboard and dials John's number. 

Uncharacteristically for the hours he keeps, it takes John a while to answer. He picks up after the fifth ring. "I TOLD YOU TO LEAVE ME THE FUCK ALONE, VINNY!"

Dave sighs heavily. "John, it's Dave. That stopped being funny about the moment you first started doing it."

"Hey Dave! Sorry about that."

"I don't think you are."

"Sorry you have such a terrible sense of humour!" John laughs down the line. 

"I'm sorry I have to ask someone more incompetent than me for help in a crisis situation," says Dave, pushing his wet hair away from his forehead with his free hand. The cold water is dripping on his shoulders and down his naked back. He'll need to take the garbage out unless he wants his entire kitchen smelling like vomit-soaked cotton. 

"Is this a crisis situation? What's up?"

Dave wants to start the sentence with _this might sound insane_ , but it would be insulting John's intelligence to assume that he wouldn't believe him straight away. They've seen a lot of weird shit since they first took the soy sauce and started dabbling in monster hunts. So instead of trying to suspend John's disbelief, he cuts right to the chase. "Do you still have that three-barrelled shotgun?"

"Do you mean my most prized possession? I'd sooner let my incredibly enormous dick fall off than let that thing go."

"I need you to haul ass down here, with the shotgun," says Dave. He gets to his feet and starts opening the kitchen cabinets in search of liquor. Preferably something that burns as it goes down. "And a chainsaw, if you can."

"Oh shit, there's a monster there? Don't worry, dude, I'll be there sooner than you can say pneumonoultramicroscopi—fuck, I forgot the rest, but I'll be there really soon!" He hangs up, and the line goes dead.

Dave finds a half-empty bottle of bourbon and takes it through to the living room. He picks up the laptop from the floor, setting it and the bottle on the coffee table. He sits on the sofa and pulls the crossbow from underneath it, finding it already loaded. He places it next to him and takes a swig of the bourbon, clicking on Robot Unicorn Attack in his browser. He presses Z to make his wishes come true, and settles into trying to beat his high score before John shows up.

The sky is starting to turn lighter and the birds are chirping somewhere in Dave's white trash neighbourhood when he hears the unmistakable noise of John's Cadillac, and even louder than that, John Fogerty warning everyone in a five mile radius that they shouldn't go out tonight because they are bound to end up dead. 

The clock on Dave's laptop says 04:57 a.m. when John kicks his front door open with a shriek like Tarzan. He has a boom box hoisted on his shoulder, and it's blasting _Prime Mover_ by Zodiac Mindwarp. Dave simultaneously feels ashamed and proud of the fact that he can recognise the song by the guitar riff alone. 

In his other hand, John is wielding a chainsaw. He pulls the starter handle and the engine grunts to life. "Where is that motherfucker?" he yells. 

Dave closes the browser tab containing Robot Unicorn Attack, killing the demonic looping synthpop. "Hey, John," he says. 

"You're not wearing a shirt," observes John, walking up to the coffee table. He slams the boom box down on it, his chainsaw still held aloft. "No offense, but if it's _that_ kind of crisis situation, I think you should wait until Amy's awake. Get her on Skype for some cybersex. It would be a better choice for the both of us."

"The only clean shirt I could wear is now in the trash and covered in my vomit, because I had a dream that I'd transformed into a monster," says Dave, trying to make himself heard above the music and the chainsaw. "As far as I know, I could have put my skin back on to trick you, so I can kill you when your guard is lowered and go on a murderous rampage through town."

"Put your skin _back on?_ " echoes John, warily eyeing the crossbow in Dave's lap.

"I shed it at some point, and then Monster Dave jumped out and gave me the biggest shit-eating grin I've ever seen."

"This was in the dream, right?" asks John. He tightens his grip on the chainsaw. 

"That's just the thing, I don't know," says Dave. "It could have been real. I woke up here, sure, but I've had gaps in my memory before. Back when we first found out that I wasn't the real Dave."

"You are the real Dave, though," argues John. "You're the only Dave."

"Yeah?" scoffs Dave. "Tell that to my foot." He thumps his foot on the coffee table, peeling his sock off to show Korrok's symbol to John. It looking as vivid as the day they first saw it was there. A superfluous gesture, perhaps, certainly overdramatic, but necessary, given the situation and the fact that John does not look nearly as freaked out as Dave feels. 

"Look," says John, trying to be louder than Zodiac Mindwarp. He gives up, hits the stop button and tries again. "Look, dude, we've been over this. You're Monster Dave by name, real Dave by nature. Amy and I accept you for who you are, and all that support group stuff. Do you need it in writing? Maybe I could get that plane that spells it out in the sky: YOU ARE THE REAL DAVE, QUIT WHINING."

"You know that I've only dreamed about things that have happened to me, or are about to happen to me," says Dave, considering his crossbow. The only bolt he had to hand was the one that is in it at the moment. He is pretty sure that John had given him more to go with the thing, but he didn't feel like risking the laundry pile that was his bedroom floor in case he accidentally impaled himself on one. 

"Have you been hitting the sauce?" asks John. Thumbing the foregrip of the crossbow, Dave gives him a look. "I can see the fucking bourbon. I ain't asking about that."

"There's still none in the cylinder. It's frozen to the side of my freezer along with some ancient fudgsicles, I haven't touched it," says Dave. "It's not a reaction to the sauce, John. It's the real thing." 

Dave raises the crossbow, bracing the stock on his knee. The small distance should assure that he doesn't miss. Anyway, what kind of a totally inept idiot misses when trying to off himself? "I know, I'm doing the adult thing and nipping it in the bud. I'm as surprised as you are. Don't tell Amy about this, okay? Make up something incredibly cool, like how I rescued a little girl from a goat-faced, flesh-eatin' worm and had to offer myself up as sacrifice to sate its hunger." 

Looking at John, he puts his finger on the trigger. John is grinning weakly, like he still thinks Dave is joking. "Chop me into pieces with the chainsaw and then set the pieces on fire. Don't want to risk any of this getting loose, right?" He laughs, and John's face falls. His expression twitches into shock, the way it would if he missed a step going down a staircase.

Dave applies the smallest amount of pressure to the trigger. 

At the same moment, John drops the still frighteningly operational chainsaw to the floor and throws himself across the coffee table. 

Dave pushes the trigger as John's knee kicks the crossbow and John pushes both hands into Dave's chin, making Dave's head tilt upwards. It makes Dave nearly bite his own tongue in half. 

The bolt thunks into the ceiling, and plaster rains down on the pair of them. 

"You egotistical son of a bitch," says John, half straddling Dave's lap and half on the floor. Dave doesn't wait for the rest of the diatribe. Instead, he picks up the crossbow and lets the stock connect with the side of John's head with some force. 

John yowls, grabbing his head and sliding down into the small space between the sofa and the coffee table. He looks like a clothes horse someone had sat on by accident. "That better not have given me a concussion!"

"Let's see – how many fingers am I holding up?" Dave raises his middle finger at John's face. 

John runs a hand through his hair, combing the stray flakes of plaster out of his curls. "Message received," he says. "Me and my shotgun are spending the night in case Monster Dave decides to rear his ugly head again." He wriggles, trying to stand up.

"You have to be at work in an hour and a half," Dave reminds him.

"So do you," grunts John, feet pushed against the sofa and using the coffee table to hoist himself to his feet. 

"Were you even paying attention to what we were talking about?" Taking pity on him, Dave stands up, grabbing John's arm just above the elbow and pulling him to his feet. "I'm not going to work."

"Great, because neither am I! We can stay in, braid each other's hair and talk about boys." John reaches behind Dave to take the crossbow, and steps over the coffee table again. "I'm gonna get something from the car. Don't explode all over the walls while I'm gone. And Dave?"

"What?"

"I'm not feeling threatened here, but I'm just saying. Put a fuckin' shirt on. Your nipples are staring at me."

"Like _actually_ staring at you?" By this point, Dave would not be at all surprised to find he'd grown a pair of eyes instead of nipples. 

John peels his upper lip from his teeth in a disgusted sneer. "No, you dillhole. Just find a shirt." He opens Dave's front door and walks to his Cadillac, humming _Prime Mover_ on his way.

Dave goes to his bedroom, deciding to risk the mayhem of his bedroom floor to search for a shirt clean enough to wear. He finds a half empty tube of Pringles, several bottles of Corona and cans of Coke, all of them empty, an odd sock patterned with crocodiles in sunglasses he doesn't remember owning, and finally, a black Tool shirt that's so faded it has turned grey. It smells like pot, although the last time Dave remembers smoking any was at least three months ago. He doesn't stop to consider the implications that lie behind that fact; he just shakes it out a bit to get rid of most of the dust. 

He's done pushing his head through the neck of the shirt when John comes back. He leans on the doorframe of Dave's bedroom, sparking his lighter and lighting up a cigarette. His sawed off shotgun is now stuffed down the back of his jeans – Dave can see the edge of its butt poking from behind John's back when he shifts to puff out a plume of smoke and say, "Cool, you didn't explode."

"Is that what you went to the car for?" Dave asks, indicating the cigarettes. 

"Yup," says John. "Oh, and the shotgun, of course. Forgot it the first time."

"You got here to help me out about a monster and _you forgot your weapon in the car?_ "

"I got the chainsaw and the boom box. A guy only has so many arms," John shrugs. He takes another drag on his cigarette. "You've found a shirt, that's great. Now the risk of you stepping outside into the light of the rising sun and exclaiming THIS IS THE SKIN OF A KILLER is a bit smaller."

"I really hope I gave your dumb ass a concussion," says Dave, and John grins. 

"That totally sounds like something the real Dave would say. You're getting pretty good at this." John flicks ash from the tip of his cigarette into a corner of the room. "Okay, let's get this show on the road. Where did you say you shed your skin?" 

Seeing John go from relaxed and slouching to an attempt at professionalism, and witnessing him apply his practiced bedside manner to Dave instead of one of their clients is equal parts hilarious and unnerving. Dave gets to his feet, minding where he steps so that he doesn't kill himself by tripping over a trickily tangled pair of dirty jeans on his way to the door. "The bathroom," he says. 

John nods, letting Dave sidestep him and go into the bathroom. He hangs back as Dave hits the light switch. As the light is spitting on, Dave is fully expecting to see a pile of discarded skin and tissue on the floor – his stomach does a pre-emptive flip, but when the light turns on all the way, there's nothing on the floor apart from a lonely, empty toilet roll and several bits of fluff that mysteriously turn up in the corners of bathrooms across the multiverse. 

John sits on the lip of Dave's bath, shaking the ash from his cigarette into the plughole. "What were you doing when it happened?" he asks.

"Brushing my teeth."

John sucks on his cigarette, tapping his foot thoughtfully. "Could you do it again?"

"Seriously?"

"Yup," says John. "Don't worry – if you decide to turn on me and eat my face, I've got my shotgun right here." To prove he means business, he takes the shotgun out of his trousers and props it against the bath.

Dave faces the mirror. He needs a haircut, a shave, and for that zit in his left eyebrow to go away, but there doesn't seem to be anything particularly abnormal about him. He squints and tries to look at himself out of the corner of his eye. Still nothing. Just the same old Dave who had been looking at him from the other side of the mirror for the past twenty-something years. Or the past couple of months, after he replaced the real Dave, killed him and buried his body in the Mall of the Dead. Details, details. He takes the tube of toothpaste, squeezing some out onto his toothbrush. 

"Pink toothpaste? Classy," John comments from behind him. 

"I have sensitive teeth, and also, fuck you," snaps Dave. He starts brushing. The minty taste on his tongue turns his stomach, an unwelcome reminder of what he saw himself become. What he _is._ He thinks of Amy, probably still asleep in her dorm room, of John – who chooses that moment to flick the butt of his cigarette and have it land neatly in Dave's toilet – and what would happen to them if he transformed in front of them. 

He spits out the toothpaste, twisting the tap and washing the taste off his tongue. He concentrates on the cold water in his mouth rather than the thought of Monster Dave being responsible for Amy and John's deaths.

Would he black out again, like he did when he killed the real Dave, and not remember anything until he stumbled on another body in his shed? Or would he vividly live through every detail? Which one of those would feel worse?

"Dave, are you okay?" 

Dave tries breathing through his mouth until the hum of blood in his ears dies down and he stops feeling like his knees are going to give out. "Yeah, fine," he says. "Just went down the wrong end." He washes off the toothbrush and fails not to think about how he was too afraid to open his mouth wide so that his jaw wouldn't click the way it did earlier.

"You're really pale, dude," says John. His reflection in the mirror looks genuinely concerned, and it freaks Dave out more than anything else up to that point. "Shit, is this what it looks like, Dave? Is a pasty ass white boy your final form?"

Dave snorts. "I'm glad you're entertained," he says.

"I'm having the time of my life," chuckles John. "You know those old movies where it's so obvious they're just using Jell-O and red Kool Aid? It's like that." He shakes his head, and pulls another cigarette from his pack. Dave watches him light it up and take a deep drag before saying, "Dave, you aren't gonna turn into a monster any time soon. Trust me." 

Dave grimaces, turning to face John. "You know I fucking hate it when you say those two words," he says.

"I'm pretty much the second best expert you'll get on this," John assures him. "Dude, you use pink toothpaste because you're worried about your teeth, and I'm pretty sure you were playing Robot Unicorn Attack before I got here. That sure as hell ain't your typical devourer-of-worlds behaviour."

"How the fuck would you know—" Dave begins. John raises a hand very dramatically in an attempt to make him stop talking like they do in all the clichéd movie scenes, but Dave isn't falling for that. He presses on. "How the fuck would you know what isn't typical for this? Remember the shit that happened to Detective Appleton?"

"Gonna stop you right there, David," says John. "I don't say this often, and if you repeat this to anyone I _will_ eviscerate your ass, but best friends aren't just there to help you close the gates of Hell in a casino in Vegas. Sometimes they have to tell you when you're being dumber than a sack of hammers and use some brutally fuckin' tough love on you so that you stop being more melodramatic than a Brazilian soap opera." He gives Dave a stern look over the glow of the end of his cigarette, daring him to come up with a contradiction. It's not an expression John often wears, and it's definitely not the kind of stuff he usually says. Deciding he's not the kind of guy to look gift honesty in the mouth, Dave lets his shoulders relax. 

"If you turn out to be wrong about this, John, I'm going to kill you first out of pure spite," he says.

John laughs and stands up, clapping Dave amicably on the shoulder. "You're totally allowed to do that, dude," he says. "Now, where's that bourbon? All this hard work got me thirsty."

They end up drinking the rest of the bourbon sprawled across Dave's sofa and playing Crash Team Racing on Dave's old Play Station as the dawn sun pokes through the blinds, attempting to penetrate the dust and cigarette smoke in the air. They move on to a bottle of second-grade vodka John digs out from behind a wardrobe, where he claims he put it for safe keeping two months ago. The time when they have to go to work comes and goes and Dave doesn't spare it a second thought. As John cleverly points out, Wally isn't going to miss them anyway. Dave almost tells him that Wally isn't a real person, but he decides that it isn't the time or the place for it. Instead, he concentrates on pushing John's kart into a pit of lava, and he doesn't think of Monster Dave again.

  


* * *

  


Two weeks later, Dave wakes up with a spider gnawing on his leg.

**Author's Note:**

> Monster Dave is based on [this piece of art](http://www.keiththompsonart.com/pages/wendigo.html) by Keith Thompson. Zodiac Mindwarp's music video for [Prime Mover](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruX1dzsM4Ek) marks the moment in history when the art form of music videos reached its peak. Nothing before or since has been able to exceed it.


End file.
